Spy Vs. Spy Linda Robinson's compelling opening paragraph in US News and World Report is at once suggestive and accusatory. It is sugge...
Spy Vs. Spy
Linda Robinson's compelling opening paragraph in US
News and World Report is at once suggestive and accusatory. It is suggestive
of what human intelligence gathering and analysis can achieve while subtly
asking why it was not done before.
In the second week of December 2003, U.S. Special Forces captured an Iraqi
man named Fawzi Rashid, a top insurgent leader in Baghdad. Rashid was carrying
a letter from Saddam Hussein, U.S. News has learned, that was less than a week
old. It would prove to be the key break in the 10-month manhunt for the Iraqi
dictator. Military intelligence specialists, working with the Green Berets,
persuaded Rashid to identify the courier who had delivered the letter. Two
days later, the courier led U.S. forces to Saddam's grim spider hole. The
lightning-fast sequence of events was the result of a decision to have
intelligence analysts work side by side with soldiers, known in Pentagon-speak
as "collectors." "Analysts were telling the collectors what
they needed, and collectors were giving their collections right back to the
analysts," says a senior Pentagon official, describing Saddam's capture.
"What's new . . . is that you had analysts and collectors all under the
same chain of command."
If the target in the story was Saddam Hussein, the target of the story was
the Central Intelligence Agency. But the Washington
Post describes the US military efforts to create a human intelligence
gathering infrastructure in less glowing terms, depicting it as a Rumsfeldian
dodge to conduct operations without Congressional oversight.
The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a
new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad,
according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The
Washington Post.
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support
Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total
dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to
operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control,
the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists,
interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special
operations forces. ... Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain
accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence
missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors
believed. ... Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report
to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the
Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines
issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state
that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations
. . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification
unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as
ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards
the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of
imminent combat.
At a Department
of Defense briefing, an unnamed senior Defense official flatly denied these
charges, emphasizing that these Strategic Support Teams were in fact lineal
descendants of earlier units called "Human Augmentation Teams"; that
they would operate directly under senior commanders -- but not the Secretary of
Defense -- and that the tasks of the teams were coordinated with the Director of
Central Intelligence. That hardly mollified some critics. AP
writer Robert Burns reports "Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and other
Democrats called for hearings, but Republicans balked. According to The
Washington Post, the Department of Defense is changing the guidelines with
respect to oversight and notification of Congress by military intelligence. Is
this true or false?" Feinstein wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld." One key difference, according to the IHT
was that ""DOD is not looking to go develop strategic
intelligence," said one senior adviser to Rumsfeld who has an intelligence
background. "They're looking for information like, where's a good landing
strip?"
It appears that they are looking for slightly more than that. Global
Security reports that the Pentagon is building up a constellation of human
intelligence support systems including:
- J2X CONOPS -- a system for providing analytic support to HUMINT operations
at the strategic, theater, and tactical echelons; - ROVER -- a geospatial Information System-Palmtop- Digital camera system;
- FALCON, FORUM and SMINDS -- which are automatic translation systems
enabling people of different languages to speak to each other simultaneously
or interpet documents in foreign languages while in the field. - WMD1st and Digital RSTA -- WMD analysis and a targeting tool; and
- a HUMINT laptop system to house all the relevant tools.
This looks very much like a closed-loop system in which intelligence leads
can be prosecuted iteratively until they lead to action, with no discernible
boundary in between. But it is not the philosophical abolition of the barrier
between thought and deed that really rankles. It is also about turf. Linda
Robinson asserts that the scale of the Pentagon effort effectively threatens
the CIA monopoly on spying, whatever the Department of Defense says.
A key flashpoint has been the recruitment and handling of sources. For many
years, all intelligence sources recruited by U.S. agencies, including the
Pentagon, were registered and maintained through the CIA's InterSource
Registry. Now the Pentagon has begun registering the human sources it uses for
military purposes under a separate registry, called J2X.
Whether or not the Pentagon succeeds in its endeavors remains to be seen.
What is less debatable is the need to improve human intelligence operations.
Marc Ruel Gercht in a Weekly
Standard article described the CIA's currently human intelligence system as
seriously broken. He believed that as presently constituted the Agency had no
chance of significantly penetrating the ranks of the terrorist enemy.
One can, however, grade intelligence services on whether they have
established operational methods that would maximize the chances of success
against less demanding targets--for example, against Osama bin Laden's al
Qaeda, which is by definition an ecumenical organization constantly searching
for holy-warrior recruits. It is by this standard that ... the CIA will
continue to fail, assuming it maintains its current practices. ... It was in
great part structurally foreordained: Not only the promotion system but also
the decision to deploy the vast majority of case officers overseas under
official cover--posing as U.S. diplomats, military officers, and so on--set in
motion a counterproductive psychology and methods of operation that still
dominate the CIA today. ... And there is simply no way that case officers--who
still today are overwhelmingly deployed overseas under official cover or,
worse, at home in ever-larger task forces--can possibly meet, recruit, or
neutralize the most dangerous targets in a sensible, sustainable way.
It is into that gaping breach that the CIA's rivals will sail.
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